Ubisoft – Zombie U “wasn’t even close to being profitable”

The highest selling third-party game on the Wii U wasn’t even close to being “profitable”, Ubisoft’s CEO Yves Guillemot has confirmed.

Zombie U, a launch title for the Wii U, failed to make a profit and the publisher has no plans for a sequel.

Speaking to GI.Biz, Guillemot said the Wii U exclusive didn’t even come close to recovering the investment the publisher made on the game.

He went on to say that the failure of the game as a Wii U exclusive was the main reason for switching Rayman Legends from being a Wii U exclusive to a multi-platform game.

“We must find a way to ensure the creativity of those games could have a big enough audience,” he said. “We hope it will take off. At the moment, we’ve said ‘let’s do through Christmas and see where we are from there.”

“We were there with four games for them [at launch]. It’s been a disappointment when you look at sell-through and, as a company, we have to be very judicious where we deploy our resources,” he told GI.Biz.

Moore cited the lack of online engagement on the console as being one of the main reasons for its titles making little impact on the system.

“The lack of online engagement that we see on Wii U [is troubling]. It’s so integral to what we do. They’re so small it’s hardly worth running the servers. It seems like a box that’s out of sync with the future of EA – which is one that gives a real social feel to our games. The Wii U feels like an offline experience right now.”